john h.

At the time I am writing this it is too easy to make a fake account and write fake reviews on google business listings. I have negative defamatory fake reviews for my company. As far as I can tell they violate google's own policies but there is no way to remove them because they didn't write anything. Its just stars.

On the other hand I know of competitors who boast about having fake reviews of the same nature but positive ones they have made.

This is the issue. Google needs to create a minimum text requirement of at least a couple sentences to help remove fake reviews. This would make reviews, both positive and negative, easier to flag.

I have had very good experiences with the better business bureau. They actually check to make sure that a consumer is writing a review for your business or at least a person who sought services with your company. They try to weed out reviews businesses leave for themselves and defamatory negative reviews competitors and third party or spiteful individuals may leave by asking for actual evidence! What a concept!

Google, yelp and other review services need to catch up.

I have a yelp listing and there are a number of good reviews written for my company. Many of these good reviews by actual legit customers have been pushed down despite some of them having multiple friends and multiple yelp reviews. This has left only one good review on yelp out of a number of good reviews. As yelp reps have told me, But people can still click and see the good ones we don't recommend! But you don't know that in the Google listing because these are not displayed.

Recently a third party in a transaction between me and my client wrote me a defamatory review on yelp. This review has been featured prominently because of the number of friends and posts etc this user has on yelp (I was told this by a yelp rep). Yet they have never actually interacted with me or my company and the job was done well and with integrity (otherwise they may have opted to sue my company as may be their right). Because of this I am at a 3 star rating featured prominently on Google due to suppression of actual customer reviews which were 'too glowy'.

I have talked with other small business about this same issue. The poor quality of review control with what Yelp may consider freedom of speech but is in fact defamation. Freedom of speech does not give the right of defamation a tort which infringes upon the rights of others. Until yelp substantially improves weeding out of fake reviews both positive and negative and ensuring that real reviews receive their rightful place of prominence on business listings yelp will remain a 1 star company.

Of course after this I started to receive more calls from yelp reps asking me to sign up (a correlation perhaps as I have no proof otherwise).

On a final note your business rating on yelp gets two prominent places on Google. One is listed directly on yelp the other on the mapquest listing for the company (not guaranteed that both will show up but that is my experience.) This gives unbalanced impressions of companies. Although a representative ensured me that people will be so thorough in checking to be sure what people are actually saying and that they will know these are both yelp ratings my experience is that people don't have time to do that. The first impression is the one that sticks.

Yelp needs to clean up their act. I look forward to a legislative and/or legal reprimand for this and other fast and loose review websites.